Abstract

Available data indicate that most languages employ three categories of Voice Onset Time (VOT) to distinguish homorganic stop consonants. The three categories, voicing lead/short lag/long lag, are temporally discrete and, in the opinion of some researchers, may coincide with psychoacoustically predetermined regions of auditory sensitivity. Moreover, speakers of languages which display a two‐way opposition (i.e., /ptk/ vs /bdg/) seem to employ adjacent VOT categories (e.g., short lag and long lag) and not the extreme categories (i.e., voicing lead and long lag) to differentiate stops having the same place of articulation. Data gathered from native (but bilingual) speakers of Hebrew and Puerto Rican Spanish reveal that they commonly use either the extreme categories of VOT or voicing lead and a category intermediate to short and long lag. These data, together with those previously reported for Canadian French, Danish, and Korean, raise questions about the specific relationship between auditory sensitivity and the determination of VOT categories in natural languages. [Research supported by NINCDS.]